An equivalence of the dot syntax for enums of Swift in Rust?

language design
10

This is a bit off topic, but I have a different opinion on your thread. Although in the name elision, it's straightforward that it cleans the code, but I think it hinders code readability to some degree. For an enum, we usually only care about its values, not its type, but for a struct, we care about more, like its methods and trait implementations, which means we need to know which type it is. The destructing example you wrote in the thread is fine for me, but I don't like it to be applied to constructing an instance of a type because of the aforementioned reason.

For example, I will hesitate to write my code as this

let sampler = device.create_sampler(& _{
            address_mode_u: AddressMode::ClampToEdge,
            address_mode_v: AddressMode::ClampToEdge,
            address_mode_w: AddressMode::ClampToEdge,
            mag_filter: FilterMode::Linear,
            min_filter: FilterMode::Linear,
            mipmap_filter: FilterMode::Nearest,
            compare: Some(CompareFunction::LessEqual),
            lod_min_clamp: -100.0,
            lod_max_clamp: 100.0,
            ..Default::default()
        });

because I (and somebody else inspecting my code) will lose the context if we don't check the method signature for argument types. The type required here is not necessary for the compiler, but for us. Imagine later when we need to refactor code and store this descriptor as a template, if we wrote it like _{...}, we don't have a clue which type it is unless we dig into .create_sample() method.